What’s with the Prefix up?
Have you noticed how the prefix up has permeated our world. Slowly from lowly words like upwards, uplift we have shifted gears to the corporate argot of upsell, upmarket, upside, upturn, upswing and whole lot of other uppy words.
What has happened? Why are we prefixing up to all sorts of nouns? I think we want to keep the mood buoyant by associating everything with up. In our consciousness up is associated with rise. The market is bullish, the economy is buoyant, the GDP is creeping towards double digits. So it is up, up and away-for now, at least. With the mood that is pervading now it is unlikely that you will ever have the prefix up associated with the noun hill. No task is uphill. For that matter, no path is downhill.
But there are some popular words which although prefixed with up, do not give the intoxicating feeling of truly going up. For example, consider, upload. Upload gives you as much of a heady feeling as does download. You are as much a cool dude if you upload your photo on the Facebook as you are if you download itunes from the Net.
As an aside, have you ever wondered why the hell is it called upload? It isn’t as if the uploader’s machine is on first level and the server into which the video is being uploaded is on the 44th level. On the contrary, quite the opposite may well be true: the server yard on the first level and the ipad uploading a game on the 44th level. You may want to reflect on how download came into the popular lexicon. And another food for thought: why is it called cloud computing? It is not as if gods on cloud nine are doing the computing. Think about it.
At times the prefix down gives an aura of being upwardly mobile. For example, if you live and shop in downtown Rome, you have arrived. In fact, you could be counted with the nouveau-riche, the parvenus, and the uppity. Notice, that the last word has up as a prefix -the origin of the word perhaps from up+ity- and the resultant word is snobbish and vain. Not quite the up you were looking for.
The moral of the story: what goes up must come down.